Hello, and welcome to Drabbletober. This is episode 3, season 3, for Saturday the third of October 2026.
Hedge Witch
by Elizabeth Guilt
She was a vile old bag, a pile of cardigans wrapped around a core of hatred. We heard her muttering in her tiny garden, forever fiddling with herbs and plaiting shapes out of larch twigs and rags.
We should have arrested her. The stories from the war were enough evidence. But everyone found some excuse; no-one wanted to deal with her crazed mind.
The orders came, eventually. I drew the short straw and wrestled her out from her forest of twisted twig-figures.
"Why?" I asked her. "Why bother with all these useless charms?"
"Kept you fuckers away for years, dinnit?"
Magic doesn't always need to be a complicated spell-casting system. I'd say this witch's magic was 100% successful, at least for a while.